Index
Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya trip report – pre-trip
The flights
Accra
Coconut Grove
The rain forest
Nigeria Air and Sheraton
Flight problems
Kenya
The trip home

It was my very first trip to any part of Africa and therefore I was concerned about all kinds of things – malaria, bad food, bad water, etc. I guess I sometimes am a bit over cautious. I first went down to the local health clinic and received eight different shots. I decided to skip the rabies shot as it seemed a bit unlikely that I would be attacked by a pack of stray dogs.

I had written previous about all of the options of malaria medication – I decided to take Doxycycline. The potential side effects were sun sensitivity, nausea, and stomach pain. You also need to take the medicine 2 days prior and 4 weeks after you come back. It was a good choice as I did not experience any side effects.

I was also concerned about the mosquitoes and went to my local Cabela’s to try and find some serious mosquito repellent. I ended up getting Sawyer Premium Insect Repellent with a trigger spray to spray on my clothes. For skin protection, I purchased Ultrathon Insect Repellentlotion with 34% deet.

Additions to my travel gear

I added the Large Personal Organizer from LL Bean to my travel accessories. It’s a sturdy, hanging toiletry kit that makes it easy to organize everything with plenty of zippered pouches and waterproof holders.

I also added a Mophie Air charger for my iPhone. The Mophie Air charger has enough juice to power up an iPhone from 0% to 100%. The case makes it a bit more bulky than normal but the added battery life made it worth the extra inches, especially when traveling.

Carry on

My carry on for this trip consists of:
Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer
Mophie Air
3G 60GB ipod (love the Walkmen’s lastest album Lisbon)
Dell laptop
Plane Quiet noise cancelling headphones
tons of movies
Skooba Cable Stable Dlx
Getting Things Done book by David Allen (I am half way through implementation and simply love the simplicity of his organization methods)
Decoding Air Travel book by Nicholas Kralev (Very well written, highly recommended)
Zip up portfolio for passports, tickets, loyalty cards
Various medicine

Visas

I was required to get a visa for all three countries with the Nigerian visa being the most expensive. The interesting thing was that they all came back as being hand written visas and not typed visas – even Kazakhstan types there’s for goodness sake.

Routing
My routing was
SLC – MSP – AMS – ACC
ACC – LOS
LOS – NBO
NBO – AMS – DTW – SLC